13 the creativity habit - learning development institute studioteaching... · 13 the creativity...

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Introduction

Imagine you are taking a new class and at the first session, as one of 80 students, you are given a banana or an orange. Before you start to eat, you are asked to peel your fruit in a way that is different from how you ordinarily do, and in an unusual manner, and to sketch your efforts as you proceed. While you’re familiar with the fruit, you’ve never given much thought as to how to be creative in this ordinary part of your life. This is the start of a different form of thinking in the class, one that will continue with a series of challenges and exercises to increase your personal creativity. The first assignment will build on this; it is to eat something different, and it is the first of a series of challenges called “differents” that encourage divergence through your entire life.

How this course, Creative Problem Solving, is taught, and how it has developed, is the focus of this chapter.

I knew this course on creativity was unusual… let’s say different… the first time it was offered. Sometimes a course will have a life and power all its own, much like a novel or poem has its own momentum, and this certainly has been the case with Creative Problem Solving. In the middle of teaching the class for the first time, I was walking through the college administrative area and the assistant dean asked me if I was teaching a cult. Puzzled, I asked what prompted her question. It turned out that, independent of my knowledge, my students had all decided to wear aluminum foil in a class to which I was a visiting lecturer. Some had foil skull caps, others aluminum ribbons in their hair, and some wore foil jewelry. They were expressing their individual crea-tivity while declaring their solidarity with me and with each other - and their difference from everyone else in the class. My understanding, both of the course and of aluminum foil, was changed substantially. Students were and continue to be enthused about how the course changes their creativity and thinking processes.

Having taught for years in the design fields - in architecture, in graphic design, and in instructional design - I’ve come to understand that creativity does not develop spontaneously, even in design or studio courses, but must be specifically addressed as a topic. At the same time, many aspects of the studio environment are critical, such as the action-oriented and direct

13 The Creativity HabitBrad Hokanson and Marit McCluske

BK-DEP-BOLING_ET_AL-160068-Chp13.indd 180 2/16/2016 7:52:18 PM

The Creativity Habit

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Name: _______________________________________

How did your peel your fruit differently? [write and diagram your idea and what you did]

banana orange

Figure 13.1 Idea capture form, from first day of class. Brad Hokanson.


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2625242322212019181716151413121110987654321 personal involvement of learners. It was in my college and graduate studio

courses where I had the opportunity to be inventive and divergent, which helped me develop my creative capabilities. This time in studio has inspired my teaching methods.

The studio format was the constant, a structure for learning and working. Studio was always a presence, a way of life, and then there were other classes. That was true in art, in architecture, in urban design, and in instructional design. I’m not sure if I was taught design, but rather I was in an environ-ment where I learned design. No one ever said, “Here’s what an idea is. You should have one.” It was something you discovered. The challenge of design centered around a guiding concept, which was central to a lot of my learning.

The necessity for creativity, for human ingenuity, is without doubt. Creativity is a skill that can be employed for a small task or for a large project and in everyday life. Creativity is important in any field, from business to mathematics, from engineering to the arts. Businesses around the world recognize this skill as essential and seek out the most creative workers for their enterprises. It’s also recognized through the achievements of a lifetime; research has shown that creativity is three times as strong an indicator of future lifetime achievement than intelligence (Plucker 1999). The goal of this course and this proposal is to increase the creativity of each student.

This course is looked on as a continuum; as a set of projects that act together, like a longer-term treatment. The real goal of the class, to develop creativity, can be seen in the various aspects of the projects and exercises; to develop the ability and habit of generating more ideas (ideational fluency); to develop the capability of finding, refining, and stretching problems, leading to different types of solutions (ideational flexibility); and to build a capability

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1110987654321 to keep (retain, save, select) and develop ideas that are unusual and unex-

pected (originality). Developing a habit to vary will continue the impact of the course; recent research has shown increases in measured creativity are retained after two years (Im et al. 2015).

Understanding the nature of how any course is developed, presented, and improved has great value to education and the design of instruction. From our writing, we hope to better that understanding and to build our own classes and knowledge. The authors are the lead instructor of the course and a former graduate teaching assistant for the course. Most of the narrative is by the lead instructor, Brad Hokanson, with additional discussions in the text boxes by Marit McCluske.

The Idea

From the beginning, the central concept of the course was not to teach students about creativity, but rather to train them to be more creative. This changes the nature of the course from presenting information about creativ-ity to trying to consciously change the character of the learners and, over time, to build their creative skills. This is our calling, since creativity among US schoolchildren, as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, has declined significantly since 1991 (Kim 2011). The opportunities to become creative as a child have decreased just when the value of creativity is being most recognized.

So I teach a class that is different from most, different in many ways, not least in the process of how it is done and how much of what I work on can be considered “training.” My goal is to build a series of self-directed habits for creativity, a habit to vary. This would be a different conceptualization for any course. It is a course that is experiential, not abstract or mediated. Learners do the “differents” themselves, in person, reporting back to the class about their experiences and process.

Most design faculty believe that creativity develops within their design studio, not recognizing creativity as a separate skill with a need to be explicitly taught. Based on my research, creativity does increase in studio courses somewhat, but not to the extent that it does with dedicated instruction. Teaching specific design skills often drives out the general creativity skills.

I was a teaching assistant for four semesters in the course, teaching six different sections of the course. At the time, I was a graduate student completing my MFA in graphic design, and I’m currently a faculty member in graphic design and I teach an interdisciplinary design thinking and creativity course developed from parallel research to this class.


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7654321 All parts of the course are used to develop creativity; from warm ups, to

demonstrations, to exercises, to taking attendance. Assignments are inte-grated into students’ everyday lives, changing how they eat, how they talk with others, and what they wear. In every session we do exercises and activi-ties in class, and learners are pushed to generate more ideas. Every week they do something… Different. Repetition, development of positive habits, and conditioning all play a part in the course curriculum.

More than the development of declarative knowledge, this course seeks to improve the skills of learners, showing them methods of generating new ideas. It builds the habits of learners to produce long-term systems that encourage creativity, and it works to change the beliefs of learners about their own creativity and their own limits.

Effective communication of the relationship between the learner and the idea being presented becomes paramount to the success of each project. Almost every discussion session would involve some type of exercise designed to facilitate effective communication of creative ideas. Group exercises helped develop greater understanding of empa-thy and the personal realm of creative possibility of another: What is deemed creative for some is routine for others.

Figure 13.2 Wearing Something Different. Marit McCluske.



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321 Being more creative comes from a set of characteristics, including knowl-

edge, beliefs, skills, and habits. In this course knowledge, the traditional lead component of most university courses, is the least important aspect.

Belief

Belief comes from our experiences and exposure to ideas as well as our posi-tive opportunities to be creative. The most important component of being creative is a belief in our own creative capability, and that creativity is present in us all. Importantly, our level of creativity can be increased if we choose to do so. However, our belief in creativity must be followed by acting in ways that help us to develop that creativity by challenging our assumptions and personal limits. All of us are often constrained in what we can do by what we believe and by our social context.

Therefore, much of the effort in building one’s own creativity is to develop the courage and persistence to be divergent; the ability to withstand the judgment of others. As most new ideas are unpopular, there is a natural tendency to continue with the existing status quo. To bring forward ideas, one needs to have the capacity to experiment and try new things, often at the risk of not succeeding or being embarrassed.

Vygotsky (1978) held that learners can only learn material for which they are intellectually ready, only accepting new information “adjacent” to their own understanding. Similarly, learners in this class are often constrained by societal and personal pressure to conform to existing stand-ards of behavior and response. Excursions outside of expectations are self-edited or repressed. Most times, students cannot be that different from the norm. A conscious effort to extend student responses into the devel-opmental zone will enable later responses, effectively building a callus, not a scar, for the learner. We seek, in the class, to stretch the personal envelope of each student.

There are generally two groups of students that make up a class. One group consists of those that have a conscious need or desire to develop their creative thinking skills, often approaching their weekly Do Something Different (DSD) with a defined problem to solve. The second group of students are often much more hesitant and timid at the beginning of the semester due to the divergent nature of the course. A distinct sense of fear is apparent upon asking them to do something out of their comfort zone. What quickly evolves from this mix is the empathy needed to approach problems from multiple points of view. The nature of the course allows for a culture of empathy to exist in an environment typically lacking in personal engagement.



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1 Skills

The specific skills of creativity need development, whether in the process of making something habitual or in the conscious use of a creative methodol-ogy. Practice in using creativity techniques will make skills more habitual, even for the simplest task of generating more ideas. At first, there are personal limits to how many concepts or ideas an individual student can develop, but the ability to create more will come through practice. Methods for creativity must be internalized and be part of the student’s everyday experience.

Generating a lot of answers involves both inspiration and the ability to withhold judgment. Each class has an exercise or a drill to generate a lot of ideas. This is both a practice within the classroom and a presentation of the various methods of idea generation for the student to use long after the course has concluded. Exercises gleaned from a range of creativity techniques are used and include brain writing (rapidly generating multiple answers), random-word stimulation (answers triggered by a random word), mind mapping (graphically representing idea connections), and random-image stimulation. An online and mobile phone app has been developed to continue this practice away from the classroom.

One successful method for generating multiple ideas is the Attribute Listing method. It begins with an existing object or process, from which a listing of every possible attribute is generated. This includes functional,

Figure 13.3 A sketch depicting an Attribute Listing exercise. In the exercise, attributes of an object or process are listed, then changed to generate new ideas. Brad Hokanson.



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654321 visual, acoustic, taste, and smell. Each attribute is then changed in some

manner to create a new product idea. For example, the refrigerator door that has children’s art display space can be transformed to hold and display new digital art… or recipes. Also the smell of what’s been in the refrigerator can be sniffed by the appliance itself: “Maybe it’s time to change the baking soda!” the refrigerator of the future could tell you.

I would often have students engage in short design prototyping experi-ments in which one sense (sight, hearing) is substituted for another. Students would generate alternative uses of an object or a space, and then redesign an experience for a partner in which the primary sense engaged is swapped for another. Alarm clocks, way-finding signage, and cell phones were reinter-preted, designed to emulate how children experience the world through multi-sensory engagement, or how visually impaired users can navigate a space through sound. The goal was to generate a large range of ideas that explore how a routine habit could be creatively altered by altering the primary sense engaged.

Habits

While often viewed as restricting creative action, regular habits can work to develop, demonstrate, and increase creativity. These types of habits include consistent development of multiple divergent ideas, regularly providing more responses than are required, involving oneself in challenging and different activities, and consistently seeking to be more creative. Assumptions and personal limits on action can be addressed and overcome at the same time.

Perhaps the most important habit for learners to develop is the habit to vary; habitually doing divergent things, taking on new challenges as a matter of course, and extending one’s limits. We can vary many things in our lives, from the routes we travel, to our music choices, to what to have for dinner, with positive effects on our creativity.

The large assignments, the “differents”, of the course are designed to change student habits; to encourage them to move past their current habits of what to eat, how to sleep, and what to wear, and to develop in them a larger

Students practice idea generation tactics for fluency, frequency, and originality, and students are able to see how they compare and just how much improvement may be needed. Much of the course is re-learning the creative thinking skills they may have once had, and within a school setting. Therefore, I would draw on a lot of research from games and play to help mediate group work. Sometimes too much focus is placed on the “challenge” aspect and students forget to realize that a part of creativity is curiosity, playfulness, and fun.



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21 habit of adventure and exploration. This takes time and repeated practice and,

of course, it requires doing something different.

Differents

While the course has changed a lot over the years, the overall direction was set from the beginning as a course that trained the students to be more crea-tive through a series of challenges to “do something different.” These differ-ents can be seen as starting points for becoming original and creative.

Many ideas for the course were inspired by teaching I did with Gerry Allan at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the early 1980s. Early instances of differents were used in general studio classes for art and design students. Each Different or DSD is organized along a specific theme, such as eating, talking, or giving. We begin the differents with changing everyday activities, such as what to wear or how you travel to your home, and increase the complexity to be more reflective and engage with others.

The differents begin with basic challenges that can be minor changes to one’s regular habits or more substantial redefining of a problem. Subsequent challenges are more complex and reflective, pushing the learners to directly think and examine their own lives. They include doing something your “other” does that you never do; remembering something you did as a child; finding somewhere to sit without electronic stimuli and then listen for an extended period of time; and selecting one of the previous DSDs to re-do. Perhaps the most personally challenging externally related DSD is to “give” something different.

The first challenge is often to eat something different. Entering college provides a number of opportunities for students to change dietary habits and to explore new foods. For this project, many students immediately seek out different ethnic foods. Some manipulate their current eating pattern by wearing their food, eating it upside down or under water, or reshaping or blending their normal diet. The more adventuresome expand eating to go beyond traditional foods and consume flowers, twigs, ants (as a garnish to chocolate-covered strawberries) or grass. The most exploratory answers involve redefining the challenge, as students end up eating their words, or eating breakfast in the back of a police car, or eating pineapple upside-down cake … upside down.

One of the more memorable examples of an “eat” something different was a student who made pancake batter - from dry ingredients, oil, and egg - in his mouth. After mixing thoroughly, he spat it out on the grill for cooking and later consumed the finished pancake. With syrup. And relish.

In an online version of the course, one student from Cambodia noted she often ate tarantulas, which, where she lives, are common, tasty, and often served as a snack. What made them different was to have tarantulas on a sandwich. She had never eaten a sandwich before.



1413121110987654321 A more complex example of a Do Something Different is the challenge to

do something your significant other always does that you never do. This requires reflection and observation of one’s roommate, parent, boyfriend, or pet, and selecting those traits, such as peeing standing up (boyfriend), obses-sive compulsive behavior (parent), chewing tobacco (roommate), or riding in a car with your head out the window (dog), that are interesting and repli-cable. Implementing the task on a day-long basis can be both embarrassing and surprising: One single dad copied his nine-month-old son and wore (and used) an adult diaper through the course of a day.

Perhaps the most normal and yet divergent different of this type was a guy who went to Victoria’s Secret and convinced them to fit him for a bra. He measured a 36AA, and the salesperson deftly noted that Victoria’s Secret didn’t carry that size but provided him with a training bra. In the changing room, and with his girlfriend serving as the camera operator, they recorded

Figure 13.4 Wearing something different: clothes to read the newspaper at the bus stop. Jude Michael.



2019181716151413121110987654321 his experience in trying it on. While he did need some instruction from his

girlfriend, he was clearly in “different” territory.Each challenge becomes more complex and begins to be judged in the

context of the class and not in society as a whole. After weeks of personal exercises, interacting with others becomes important to developing one’s creative skills. About ten weeks into the semester, students are challenged to generate a DSD for someone outside of the course to complete. Most often this person is the roommate or friend who has been photographing the previous DSDs. In some cases, however, others are recruited to participate. As evangelists for creativity, the students strengthen their own personal crea-tivity and develop an understanding of the nature of creative challenges. Rather than specifically directing an activity, each student needs to give a challenge instead. Brothers have been dramatically made up, fathers have received pedicures, and mothers have snuck out at night to cover a neigh-bor’s tree with toilet paper. Changing gender appearances has led to unusual outfits and adjustments in restrooms.

I did wonder who that guy was; sometimes, near the beginning of class, you don’t remember all the student faces, and the guy in the back with the mustache and stocking cap looked sort of familiar. He listened intently as we sat through the other students’ work and then, when Annika took off her

Figure 13.5 Eating something different - bagel with cream cheese, via one’s feet. Lindsay N. Smith.



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day, it became clear….Evaluation of these projects through the critiques and discussions of each

assignment becomes part of the learning process of the class. While there are parts of the assignment that are very objective - such as requirements for pre-planning, multiple initial ideas, photographic documentation, and a writ-ten description - the essential aspect, originality, is a subjective evaluation.

While most of the course focuses on fluency, the ability to rapidly develop multiple new ideas, the DSDs are evaluated subjectively on originality, the novelty and uniqueness of creative efforts and whether the idea was creative or merely different from their ordinary activities. As creativity is often evaluated in comparison with society, the instructors of the course base their decisions on their own experiences as guiding heuristics. If they have done something simi-lar, it’s merely different, and not yet original. If they could imagine completing something similar, it’s moderately creative. If they laugh or gasp at the idea, indicating cognitive dissonance, it’s very original and gets the full score.

As the term progresses, learners are also asked to work with others as part-ners, as part of a team, and eventually to convince a willing civilian to attempt their own DSD. The series concludes with the construction of a Rube Goldberg Machine, a contraption that completes a task in an inventive, yet overly complex manner.

Figure 13.6 Something your “other” does. Annika Q. Yan.



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54321 The differents evolve through the semester as students gain more experience.

The differents change relationships with peers and social groups as well as the student’s understanding of and ability for creativity. Students become more capable of doing something that, just weeks earlier, would have been unthinkable.

Evolution

The course began as a freshman seminar in 2000. It continued in seminar form for six years, and over that time the course material developing iteratively.

The course subsequently developed into a large lecture course when it was required by one of our departmental majors. This necessitated a number of changes in course structure, including the use of a course management system for collecting course assignments and grading and the use of teaching assistants to lead discussion sections.

About half of the students in the course are from our Retail Merchandising major, with the rest of the students coming from across the University.

One difficulty with the defining feature of the class is the nature of creative ability itself. Explaining the complexities of creativity as it relates to weekly projects becomes tough when the concept is chal-lenging enough to define as it is. I found that sometimes students want or need extra guidance and feedback regarding the quality of ideas and “if they’re doing it right.” There’s always some disorientation that’s associated with the novelty factor of the class, and it tends to emphasize some of this need.

As the value of success is rooted in the idea, students are encouraged to report on the results of their work regardless of success or failure in execution and planning. The point is it had a result and they can learn from it. Additionally, oftentimes students become too engrossed in the thought of just getting out of their comfort zone.

During the projects that required a reflection on habits and beliefs, students frequently quickly evolved from overt “differentness” - generating the most unique idea possible - to executing a more subtly creative idea that offered up commentary on their daily experiences as college students. Many student projects explored the ingrained biases against what’s different from their own experiences. Students have used these projects as a gateway to explore homelessness, either through interviews or through the act of giving to strangers, with the intent to provoke others to think more critically about biases.



212019181716151413121110987654321 Students are generally not design students, and come from areas such as

journalism, mechanical engineering, and business.The course has recently shifted to a full online version for one of two

annual offerings. In alternate semesters, the course will continue to be offered in an in-person format. It is unlike many other courses that move to the online environment that focus on the delivery of information, develop-ment of learning through discussion, and evaluation through digital quizzes. It also functions like an online studio course, with substantial work away from the computer, located in the daily life of the learner.

Project collection in both versions is done through an online course management system, with each assignment requiring written documenta-tion and visual recording of the activity, ranging from single images to polished videos. In the discussion sections, the DSDs are presented and critiqued by the instructor and teaching assistants. The best-in-section examples are collected to be presented to the full class where a best-in-class is selected.

As with many other studio courses, there is constant pressure to be more productive and to reach more students, and this will shape the future of this course. The first format changes, from a small seminar to a larger lecture course, are understandable in any university environment. The move to an online environment is a similar shift.

Projects often become a lens through which the spectrum of personal meaning is discussed, even very early on in the semester. The asso-ciations between creativity and personal significance or expression are made through assignments that ask the student to “do some-thing different.” For example, in the case of wearing something different, students need to consider what is different for their own personal comfort zone, but also what is considered different for their culture.

This can add another level of complexity in critiquing the assignments. It’s very similar to being in a studio class and critiquing a design or a work of art in which the creator has expressed a lot of personal value. There is a challenge in being able to provide feedback on the quality and creative skill of the assignment as a whole while separating it from the personal significance to the student, and not critiquing their personal experiences or values.

This is something I find to be a unique way to observe and under-stand the dynamic of meaningful communication through creative experiments as a whole, which is arguably the most fundamental component of design.



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1 Assessment

Providing an outside benchmark for learning, everyone in the class is tested using the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The Torrance Tests were developed in the late 1950s and are the most used standard test for evaluating creativity. The TTCT focus substantially on the aspect of diver-gent thinking. Learners are tested at the beginning of the term and at the 12th week, with results provided to students to help them understand and internalize concepts of the measurement of creativity.

Measurements of student creativity indicate a class development from a beginning average 67th percentile to a final average at the 93rd percentile in measured creativity. Personally, the course remains interesting and one that is consistently changing and different from previous experience. The theo-retical background continues to develop and the research opportunities remain strong.

The Torrance Test provides an important personal connection to a research-based understanding of creativity, as well as a vocabulary to discuss concepts of creativity such as fluency (the ability to generate a number of ideas) or originality (the development of rare or unique ideas).

Instruction

This course does afford me the opportunity to work with a limited number of graduate teaching assistants in a teaching and learning environment. Their development and collaboration has been an important part of the growth of the course.

In a similar way to the students, teaching assistants evolve through teaching the course, from a more didactic approach to one of leading students to become more creative. In the end, the operation of the course must be a performance in and of itself; fluid, dynamic, and improvised, not choreographed.

Teaching assistants are also challenged by the skills nature of the course, comparing the course, consciously or unconsciously, with their own learning

Table 13.1 Percentile increases calculated from raw scores.

Average Standardized Scores [mean=100, SD = 20]

F2009 F2010 S2011 F2011 S2012 F2013 S2015

pre- 101.76 115.56 107.17 110.69 111.65 110.18 112.03percentile 53.51% 78.17% 64.00% 70.35% 71.99% 65.62% 68.46%post- 129.35 129.67 129.25 128.01 130.05 132.03 132.8percentile 92.89% 93.10% 92.82% 91.93% 93.35% 91.01% 91.78%Number

[N]50 33 36 80 41 89 46



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7654321 experiences. For this course, most have been selected for their ability to

interact with younger students as opposed to a specific skill in a discipline. They must deal with a topic that is more abstract and ephemeral, and less visible than, for example, graphic design or drawing. Studio courses in general are about providing questions and challenges, and not answers. Within this course, we go beyond the traditional discipline-based course and focus on a different skill.

Finish

One of the concepts of the course is to have learners build their learning experience in the “real world” and within their own personal experience. It is about changing their processes, their thinking, and most of all their habits, and encouraging highly skilled and motivated students to engage in this open-ended, complex learning method. In many educational experiences, most skilled students quickly seek and find the one correct answer to a prob-lem, getting to “done” as soon as possible. However, this class specifically seeks more and different answers. One central tenet is that the only wrong answer is one answer, a model that is strange and cognitively challenging for many, but essential to creativity.

Students are often surprised by this as a course and challenged by the nature of the learning. Their previous experience in education is often one of information delivery and retention and not of skills development. They do not expect a vision that includes the experiential or problem-based proce-dures of the course. Most of these students have already been highly success-ful in didactic, lecture-based, information-delivery teaching situations, and seek to continue that success through doing the same things, not by being encouraged to do something different.

References

Plucker, J. A. (1999) ‘Is the proof in the pudding? Re-analyses of Torrance’s (1958 to present) longitudinal data’. Creativity Research Journal, 12(2), pp. 103-114

Im, H., Hokanson, B. and Johnson, K. K. (2015) ‘Teaching creative thinking skills: A longitudinal study’. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 33(2), pp. 129-142

Kim, K. H. (2011) ‘The creativity crisis: The decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance tests of creative thinking’. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), pp. 285-295

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press


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